Culture War in Gaza
Michael Kimmelman reports on the banal aspects of governance in Gaza where, among other things, the ruling Islamist movement would like to clamp down on people’s access to pop culture resources but where political pragmatists say it’s necessary to bow to reality and let this stuff slide.
This reflects a larger pattern that we’ve seen around the world for quite a long time now. Sunni Islamist movements have a lot of success in opposition to incumbent regimes that are seen as corrupt and undemocratic. But Islamist ideology, when put in practice, has an overwhelming tendency to fail as a governing agenda. The popularity these movements are able to garner as an alternative to the status quo doesn’t really extend to all that much of their detailed agenda.
34 Responses to “Culture War in Gaza”
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September 7th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Sounds like the Republican Party.
September 7th, 2008 at 11:58 am
It is a situation completely alien to the U.S. experience to think that a bunch of authoritarian fundamentalist hardline carping ideologues fail to govern well once entrusted with actual power.
September 7th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Which is exactly why we can’t put ourselves in the position of conquerors in the Arab world. As Juan Cole points out, being an Arab has meant successfully opposing colonial rule for over a hundred years. We play right into jihadist ideology when we put ourselves into the position of occupiers. It’s lunacy.
September 7th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Entirely OT, but check out Frank Rich’s column today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/opinion/07rich.html?ref=opinion
Not the content itself, which is great, but the forest of embedded links! Wow!! It sets the standard for what should be expected of print journalists in the Internet Age.
September 7th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Isn’t it silly that the Republicans can criticize the Muslims for keeping pop culture out and then turn around and criticize pop culture in America across-the-board? Just one more thing that makes you wonder when the conservative base in America will start to realize how played they are by people like John McCain and Sarah Palin.
September 7th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
No, its not. To be fair, I don’t think Republicans, or Westerners in general, object to *what* Islamists think of pop culture, but *how* they go about enforcing it.
To take an extreme example, its not silly or hypocritical for an anti-gay Bible-thumper to be disgusted when the Taliban collapse walls over the heads of gays.
September 7th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
I had a friend (now deceased) that lived in India when it was divided into two countries. He had a Muslim friend that decided to move to Pakistan when the split occurred. Two years later, that Muslim man was back in India. Turns out that Muslims had more rights and opportunities in India than in Pakistan.
September 7th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Turns out that Muslims had more rights and opportunities in India than in Pakistan.
You would have to know what time frame you are talking about to decide if that was true or not. It also has nothing to do with religion on the Pakistani side.
Under the very recent BJP government, that would NOT be true at all. Being Muslim was a way to wind up dead.
September 7th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Gaza is effectively a prison of the victims of jewish colonialism. It’s rather hard in the circumstances to see how its indigenous rulers could have a successful ‘governing agenda’, any more than similar entities like Transkei. The central governing agenda of Gaza’s real rulers (in Israel) is to barrack the indigenous population and support the argument that the arabs would fuck it all up if there was ever a negotiated solution to share power. That seems to be working quite nicely to date.
September 7th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
It was all in all, a pretty crap article. The author was quite obsessive over what women put on their heads, noting for it nearly every woman he encountered. For crissakes, talkin bout the hijab was so freakin 01, I don’t understand why a respected newspaper like the NYT carps on it like a whiny b***h.
And a larger pattern? For how long and with what pervasiveness has there been a Sunni Islamist government, in power, employing its “islamist” agenda? Saudi Arabia? who else? Perspective, please.
September 7th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
“Under the very recent BJP government, that would NOT be true at all. Being Muslim was a way to wind up dead.”
Umm, the BJP doesn’t control India, the Congress Party does. Although the BJP has made some recent gains, most notably in Gujarat. And being a Muslim is surely not a way to wind up dead in India. The existence of 200 million Muslims in India would say otherwise.
September 7th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
True, but this is a difference of degree, not kind. I would rather be a member of a group that is different in kind from the Taliban, not degree.
September 7th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
True, but it should be noted that when Vajpayee and the BJP were running India, we saw the first real central state-directed pogroms (especially against Muslims, but also to a lesser extent against Christian and Jewish minorities, some of whom were confused with Muslims because of circumcision), especially in Gujarat.
September 7th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
No, its not. To be fair, I don’t think Republicans, or Westerners in general, object to *what* Islamists think of pop culture, but *how* they go about enforcing it.
I think DJ’s comment following mine is totally wrong. It’s not “fair,” it’s distortionist.
For one thing, homosexuals aren’t part of pop culture, so that’s a bad example.
But anyway, I think the reality is a lot of the anti-gay Bible-thumpers would be perfectly happy with gays dying, and the glee of right-wing Christian figures claiming that AIDS is divine judgment is just one piece of evidence showing this.
Back to pop culture– if the objection is really only about how standards are enforced, that objection is really blurred in how it’s presented– so it’s still a case of the Republicans playing people out. That is, if the Republicans go around sloganeering to the effect that “They hate us for our freedoms” over and over again, it’s pretty natural to think that the same Republicans condone a lot of the natural results of those freedoms (chicks in bikinis on TV, rock singers singing the F-word, etc.), since the most high-profile conservatives who say stuff like this sure don’t elaborate to present any distinction like “Now, I hate all the filth on Playstation and Nintendo Wii as much as you all do, but I just think you shouldn’t actually shoot anyone over it.”
The conservatives probably want their supporters to be angry enough and motivated enough to want bloodshed in America.
I think what’s really going on is, one day the conservatives are saying “Pop culture is okay, and people who freak out about it are repressing people,” and the next day (when they’re no longer speaking to a mainstream audience, but instead to their base) the conservatives say that pop culture is immoral and act like they think rap and rock ‘n’ roll should be banned.
September 7th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Risking a jail/prison sentence instead of a longer jail/prison sentence for showing some women in bikinis or a gay kiss (or whatever the offensive image is supposed to be) isn’t much of a distinction or an accomplishment. Are conservatives really fighting for pop culture to be banned by cruel punishments instead of crueler punishments? And they call that freedom and think it makes them different from the Taliban?
Remember, the vanguard of the conservatives are people who actually do believe in things like stoning and an eye for an eye.
September 7th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
I’d have to agree with otto’s overall point here: Gaza is far from being a proper test case of the viability of Islamist governance. As much as I’m opposed to Hamas’ agenda, and as much as I agree with Matt (based on ideology, not evidence) that such a system would fail by itself, any fair assessment of the time Gaza has spent under Hamas’ control would lead us to see that the condition of the territory has more to do with surrounding circumstances than internal governance. Of course, it may be fair to lay a good portion of the blame for those “surrounding circumstances” on Hamas’ wrongheaded foreign policy, but I would still argue that Hamas never got a proper chance to govern domestically.
September 7th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
A bit of self-correction here: there is actually a clear case of the failure of Islamist governance, and that is the Taliban of course. When I was making my point above, I was thinking more of the Muslim Brotherhood and its various affiliates around the Middle East, of which Hamas (more of an offshoot than an affiliate perhaps) is the first to actually make it into power.
September 7th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
You conservatives don’t object to the Muslim’s decency standards most importantly– it’s just that they’re brown guys instead of white guys and it’s a crescent-shaped symbol instead of a cross-shaped one.
If Jesus was real, he would show up, and say, “Hey, I’m Jesus and I’m real.” He wouldn’t just leave who believes in him up to chance, like a total dickhead.
The real problem with the Muslim terrorists is that they’re just as backward and ignorant as the worst of conservative religious fundamentalists in America, except they’re actually using bombs already. So what the conservatives are mad at is that there are other guys doing the shit that they want to be doing back to them. Liberals on the other hand get to be mad that people are trying to bomb our people, and also about how stupid the motivation is.
September 7th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Sunni Islamist movements have a lot of success in opposition to incumbent regimes that are seen as corrupt and undemocratic.
I think Matt Y is completely on target here.
I had dinner with a Palestinian woman who dressed like every other woman in NYC (tank top, skinny jeans, leather boots). I was shocked to hear she supported Hamas, but her explanation made sense: Fatah was so corrupt and incompetent that any change, even to fundamentalist nutjobs like Hamas, was welcome.
To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, you vote for the parties you have, not the parties you want to have. They’re stuck with the lesser evil in every country.
September 7th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Re otto
Well, leave it to Mr. otto the Kraut to blame Israel for the inability of the Palestinians to come up with a decent government. Of course, Mr. ottos’ solution to the problem is for the Government of Israel to go out of business. Then all will be well and peace and freedom will reign in Palestine. I have a flash for Mr. otto the Kraut. It ain’t going to happen; the government of Israel will not agree to go out of business and the Palestinians don’t have the wherewithal to make it do so, so the Palestinians would be better advised to ignore him and get their house in order as best they can. If Mr. otto the Kraut doesn’t find that to be to his liking, tough noogies.
September 7th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
I agree with Sid…I’m very interested in the subject matter but I thought the article was not very good..I didn’t get any sense that the author understood the situation or communicated it well at all.
Khaled, regardless of what one thinks about the Taliban, they certainly also had to deal with a legacy of two decades of war and with foreign intrigues all around including the foreign backed northern alliance with which they had to fight a war the whole time they were in power. One can say they failed, but under those circumstances it’s hard to imagine who would have succeeded.
This is a real issue but it’s hard to see when an Islamist government will get the chance to really succeed or fail on its own so it will have to really be responsible.
September 7th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Scumbag Zionist SLC doesn’t realize that sooner or later Israel will overreach itself in its paranoid delusions about itself and end up pissing off the wrong country, such as Russia or China.
Then we’ll see who has the wherewithal to deal with Israel.
Russia in particular right now is not happy with Israel for 1) arming the Georgians, and 2) planning to attack Iran from Georgia air bases. So they’re sticking a naval base in SYRIA – and conceivably could put a couple around Iran as well.
How y’all like them apples?
And as I’ve been saying all along, sooner or later somebody in the Arab world will get smart and steal an Israeli nuke. They don’t even have to set it off – just the act of getting one will force the world to disarm Israel of its nuclear arsenal. And once that happens, it’s only a matter of time until the Arab world outspends Israel on conventional armaments.
Then the Zionist freaks can kiss their stupid dream of a “Fortress Israel” good-bye – and good riddance.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:30 am
No, you don’t have to like the “natural results” of policies you support. At least, not all of them. That’s like saying you have to like the side-effects of life-saving medicines. I’d hazard a guess that conservatives would consider rock singers saying the f-word an unfortunate side-effect of freedom of speech, not its main purpose. Its perfectly consistent for them to deplore this side-effect (in their view), without detracting from their support for free expression.
Free societies don’t ban everything they don’t approve of. Doesn’t mean they have to approve of everything they don’t ban.
September 8th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Re Richard Steven Hack
Mr. Hack, the blogs’ favorite graduate of a federal prison, is apparently back on smack again. Dream on fuckface, dream on.
September 8th, 2008 at 11:25 am
There are several examples of Islamist governments taking over. Iran is one – depending on how one judges them, their record ranged from mixed to bad. The Taliban certainly counts as another one – note that whatever gains they made domestically they threw away with stupid decisions in foreign policy. Saudi Arabia is arguably another one, though many Islamists hate them.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Hektor Bim,
Iran’s Shi’a-Clerical model of Islamism developed by Khomeini is quite different from the Islamist movements of any other country. In any event, Iran was also invaded and forced to a long and unbelievably bloody war not too long after the Islamists took power.
The point that I was making is that as long as Islamist movements are attacked from without, whether by military invasion, foreign support for domestic insurgency or my economic strangulation, it will be possible for Islamists to argue that shortcomings must be seen in the light of those conditions…if an Islamist regime is allowed to simply fail (or succeed) on its own merits than perhaps one could truly argue that Islamism or Political Islam has been discredited. Many people were making these type of statements several years ago (largely based on the ‘failure’ of the Iranian model and the ‘failure’ of any other model to take power) but most observers would agree that Political Islam is, in the Muslim world generally, on an upswing.
Of course a great deal depends on definitions here, Khaled basically limited his comments to Muslim Brotherhood affiliated movements. The governments set up in Afghanistan and Iraq, at least according to their constitutions are intended to be Islamic governments where Shari’ah is a source of the law and laws contrary to Shari’ah are unconstitutional.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Hektor Bim,
Saudi Arabia is important to consider as well you are correct. Again, it is not Muslim Brotherhood type Islamism, although it has had some alliances with them in the past.
For those interested in these issues, I recommend Noah Feldman’s book “The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State.” I give a general summary of that book here: http://abunooralirlandee.wordpress.com/2008/08/27/the-fall-and-rise-of-the-islamic-state-by-noah-feldman/
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